Nutzerbasierte Bewertung von Büroimmobilien

Abstract

Das Management von Büroimmobilien beschränkt sich meist auf die Reduktion der Raumkosten. Dabei findet typischerweise keine Berücksichtigung des Trade-off zwischen Arbeitsplatzkosten und Mitarbeiterproduktivität statt. Der vorliegende Aufsatz greift dieses Problem auf und untersucht die Zusammenhänge zwischen Büroumgebung und deren Wirkungen auf Nutzer. Zunächst werden theoretische Erkenntnisse zu einzelnen Effekten auf Zufriedenheit, Leistungsfähigkeit und Gesundheit aus dem Forschungsfeld der Umweltpsychologie zusammengeführt und in einem Rahmenmodell aufgezeigt. Darauf aufbauend wird anhand einer empirischen Untersuchung die simultane Betrachtung solcher Beziehungen mittels einer Kausalanalyse dargelegt. Die Ergebnisse stellen die Bedeutung einer adäquaten Büroumgebung für den Erfolg sowohl des einzelnen Mitarbeiters als auch der ganzen betrieblichen Organisation heraus. Das Potenzial zur Steigerung der Leistung lässt sich für die vorliegende Erhebung im Mittel auf 20 % beziffern und stellt somit die einseitigen Bestrebungen von Kosteneinsparungen im Immobilienmanagement grundsätzlich in Frage. Als wesentlicher Baustein einer standardisierten Bewertung wird zudem das Konzept der Post-Occupancy Evaluation vorgestellt, welches Leitlinien zum Abgleich von Immobilie und Nutzeranforderungen bietet. Schließlich werden auch Integrationsmöglichkeiten von nutzerorientierten Bewertungen in das Management von Büroimmobilien als betriebliche Ressource aufgezeigt.Since there are millions of office workers spending 8 h the day for half of their life time in their office it should be obligatory to evaluate the impact of workspace and building on employee’s satisfaction, performance, and healthiness. But today organizations are focused only on saving real estate costs, although employee costs are around 8–10 times higher than building costs. Actually, based on typical goals of organizations like growth, performance, productivity, sustainability, our perspective rather should be turnover or profit per person which is again typically much higher than employee cost. The questions to answer is how office buildings are affecting people’s behavior and what consequences are to be expected. Knowledge of the relationship between people and the build environment is existing in theory and research in fields and content areas of environmental psychology. A lack of assessing office buildings from a user perspective is even more surprising because these studies are present for decades and should be part of research in real estate and architecture for years.A systematical approach to evaluate the performance of buildings in terms of the requirements of building occupants including productivity, comfort and satisfaction is the so called Post Occupancy Evaluation (POE). Measuring fitness for use is not only assessing technical performance and sustainability of building elements. Besides assessing overall building quality the most important part of such an evaluation is getting feedback from users of the specific building or being more precise—from each user group. Type of job, workflows, and schedules will differ from each office worker as well as psychosocial factors, such as social support from colleagues and supervisor, job decision latitude, job demand, and time pressure.The present paper is offering a framework of evaluation criteria based on multiple studies of environmental behavior, organizational behavior, an empirical study testing the theoretical model, and steps for integrating a POE in building and portfolio analysis of an organization to enhance performance of office workers. Data for the study were obtained from an evaluation of 11 office buildings. More than 630 office users participated the survey, corresponding an exceptionally high response rate of 41.7 %. Results highlight a significant relationship between office environment and job satisfaction, job performance, and healthiness. The potential boost of office workers performance is 20 % on average based on the perceived negative impact of building environment. Spatial conditions like size of workspace, size of office space, and privacy is as important as physical conditions like climate, air quality or noise. Having control over environmental and spatial conditions is one of the major items in terms of being satisfied with the building conditions in total. Compared to all office conditions conference rooms and spatial conditions for face to face communication are least important even to those office workers how spent most of their time in meetings. This finding is of special interest since one of the main arguments for implementing open space concepts is improving ease of communication between workers and teams. Having a lack of environmental conditions in open plan offices in mind, the present study indicates a negative tradeoff between concepts of cell offices and open space even considering an improvement in communication. The study included a questionnaire to managers for data triangulation in order to check whether evaluation of staff is predictable by their supervisors. Results indicate that managers were not able to predict personnel’s assessment, so ideally users should be involved in the decision process when their office space is affected.For an in-depth analysis users were clustered into different groups based on their job activities and based on their individual characteristics. Independent of user’s allocation to one of the clusters there is some general findings. Absent of noise, size of individual office space and ability to concentrate on tasks is most important to all office workers. Depending on user groups, social support from colleagues and supervisors can influence satisfaction with the office environment. Obviously users that are unhappy with the job situation project their dissatisfaction onto the office environment. Even control on job tasks and job demand may have an impact on perceived satisfaction with office and building environment, depending on user clusters.The results of the present empirical study give strong support to establish Post Occupancy Evaluation as an instrument to enhance performance of office users, rather than simply save costs in real estate and ignore the relationship between building, business, and behavior. Obstacles still remain because in most organizations savings are achievable in short term through reorganization of space and renegotiations of lease term contracts or moving into another office building. Such an implementation of POE, user feedback, and user participation rather means a paradigm shift, gaining higher turnover and higher results on the long run.